Dismal Desert
by CSIvHP11
Summary: She couldn't think of any other way out, and it wasn't like anyone was taking any notice. Very dark story set when the gang is in 9th grade.
1. Chapter 1

**Dark story, set when the gang is in 9th grade. I am giving you a major warning, this is a very dark story. I don't own the characters.**

Just five years ago, she would enter her closet to practically worship her crush. She would imagine what it would be like to date him.

Looking back, she had no idea what she had been thinking. She had realized that it had creepy and obsessive. She had made a chewing gum bust of him, for goodness sakes!

She had thrown that out the first time _She _had hit in the middle of her seventh grade year. She had held herself together until she had reached her closet. Then, she had curled up in the small area and broken slightly. It had been one thing for _Her_ to ignore her, but _She _had never hurt her before. After she had stopped crying, the bust had caught her eyes. Anger had filled her up, and she pulled it into pieces. She hadn't been able to look at him for a week.

She had been able to deal with it until over a month ago. That was when _She _had started to bring men to her room at night.

She had been used to pain by that point. _She _had been slapping her around whenever her father had a bad day at work for years. That day, however, he had lost a major sale to a competitor. They had gotten into a fight, and he had spent the night at a hotel. _She_ had to the bar, and had brought a man home with her.

That night had only been the first night. _She _had brought men tovisit her regularly after that. The pain was a new type of pain. It was deeper and more than just physical. It ate at every part of her being, slowly destroying her.

With each visit, she grew more withdrawn. She hardly talked at school. Phoebe had tried to pull her out of her slump, to figure out what was wrong. Pride and humiliation had held her tongue. How could she tell them what happened at her house?

As the visits continued, her crush completely disappeared. It had started to fade when _He_ had first hit her. After the visits, however, she just stopped caring.

At first, she had started to hate her crush. How could he not notice what was happening? Did he really not care for her? Did she matter so little to him?

She couldn't hate him for long, however. Before long, it seemed like all of her emotions had faded. All she could feel was a deep sense of melancholy.

Her sudden change in behavior scared all of them. She hadn't noticed her friends trying to pull her out of herself. She hadn't noticed as they all tried to get her to talk, including him. Nothing they did worked, however, and they eventually gave up.

Now, two months after _He _had started to visit her, she sat in the back of her closet. It looked a lot different than it had before it had all started. All of her mementos had been destroyed and thrown away. Her wardrobe had darkened.

She sat with her back against the way, and her knees pulled to her chest. Her eyes were blank, but dry. She had run out of tears months ago. She had run out of will around the same time.

She fingered the object in her fingers.

She could do it. She knew she could do it. It wouldn't be hard. Just a few slits and she would be away from her personal hell.

She looked around, and returned to her original train of thought. Her closet had changed since it had all started. It was no longer a shrine to her crush. It had turned into a safe haven from everything. She would retreat to its cool darkness after the menvisited. She would block it from inside to prevent anyone from finding her.

Now, it would also be her final resting place.


	2. Chapter 2

"Have any of you seen Helga?" Phoebe asked as she sat down at the lunch table.

"Nah, haven't seen her all day," Gerald replied as he put an arm around her shoulder.

"Maybe she's sick," Harold shrugged.

"Again? Man, she's been sick the past three days," Gerald stated.

"I still think there's something else going on," Arnold sighed.

"I'm sure there is," Phoebe agreed. "But she won't talk to us."

"There has to be something we can do," he argued.

"Who cares," Rhonda sneered as she sat down. "She hasn't exactly been our friend for the past few months."

"That's why we need to look closer," Arnold told her. "She changed so suddenly, and hasn't been herself for a while now. If something is going on, what are the chances that she's going to tell us?"

"Why don't you tell us, lover boy?" Rhonda replied.

"Lover boy?" he questioned.

"You really don't know?" she laughed. "Helga has been crushing on you since, like, the fourth grade. If she was going to tell any of us anything, it would be you."

"Wouldn't she talk to Phoebe, I mean, you two are best friends," Arnold countered, turning to the small girl.

"Well, yes, we are, but she hasn't been talking to me at all for the past few months," she nodded.

"Whatever, I still say that we let her deal with her own problems," Rhonda shrugged.

"Then you don't have to come, but I'm going over to her house today, after school. I'm going to figure out what's wrong," Arnold said.

* * *

"What do you want?" Big Bob grunted when he opened the door.

"Hello, Mr. Pataki, we were wondering if we could see Helga," Arnold said.

The large man looked him over.

"You're that Alfred kid, aren't you?" he questioned.

"It's Arnold, sir."

"Of course it is."

"Please, Mr. Pataki, we really need to see Helga," Phoebe spoke up.

"She isn't here. Her mother said that she's staying with her sister for a few days."

"We need to get something from her room for school; can we just go up and get it?" Gerald spoke up.

"I guess, but not all of you," he replied, looking at the group of them.

"Phoebe and I will go up," Arnold said.

"Okay, Phoebe, you know the way," Big Bob said, letting them in.

Phoebe quickly led Arnold through the house and into Helga's room.

"Everything is still here," Phoebe said after a few minutes of looking around. "Her phone is on her dresser and her bags are still here."

"Then where is she?" Arnold sighed.

Phoebe just shook her head and leaned against the closet door.

"This is very peculiar," she said.

"What's that?" Arnold suddenly asked, pointing to something by her feet.

Phoebe lifted her foot up, and looked closer at what he had pointed out.

"I'm not sure," she said.

Arnold moved past her to open the door.

"Helga!"


	3. Chapter 3

Arnold stared at the marble in front of him.

"I'm sorry I didn't notice," he whispered. "If I had, maybe you wouldn't be down there right now."

He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. His fingers briefly skimmed his hat. He grabbed the fabric, and pulled it off of his head. He gripped it in his hands, and sat in the grass at the end of the dirt pile.

"It's weird. Knowing that I will never see you again. Knowing that you will never speak again. That you will never call me 'Football head' again."

He chuckled slightly.

"I don't think you have called be that in years. Phoebe told me that you liked me." He paused and rubbed the back of his neck. "You could have asked me out, ya know. I wouldn't have turned you down."

He kept crushing his hat in his hands and pulling it back to its original form. He just stared at the inscription for a few minutes.

_Helga Geraldine Pataki_

_1986 - 2000_

_Wandering the dismal deserts of my tormented soul._

"Phoebe chose what to put on your gravestone. She said you wrote it in a poem," he suddenly said. "I think it's fitting. I wish it wasn't, but it is."

He sighed. "Your mom is in a mental hospital. She was doing drugs and drinking. They said that she probably had no idea what she had been doing. After they forced her to sober up, and told her what she had done, she went crazy. They aren't sure if she will ever recover.

"Nobody will recover, really. Olga is taking the rest of the semester off at school. Big Bob hasn't been to work since we found you. Everyone at school misses you. We started missing you a few months ago, when you first started to withdraw."

Anger started to rise up in him.

"If we had just seen it in the beginning, you wouldn't of had to resort to this. We could of saved you. We could of helped you."

He stood up, and put his hat back on.

"If we had even been one day faster, you would still be with us."

He pulled a fabric flower out of his jacket pocket. He stepped forward, and laid it on top of the gravestone.

"We're all gunna miss you. Nothings gunna be the same."

He turned around, and stuffed his hands in his pockets as he walked away.

**See, dark. I hope you liked it, even if it was dark. let me know how it was, just don't flame me. I told you before hand that it's dark, so if you read it, and don't like how dark it is, you are to blame. Also, the line in the epithet is from one of her poems, just as it says in the story.**


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